William Carter

This is an old screenshot from the game in 2010. The rest of the photos below are from the 2011 E3 demo.

A lot can change in a year. The last time I saw XCOM at E3 2010, the game looked more like a shooter that the successor to one of the most acclaimed strategy games of all time. All the planning and tactics happened before the mission. It’s in how you choose which objective to take or what new alien weapon to research. The strategy element seemed light.

Fast-forward 12 months later and XCOM has done a complete 180. At E3, it looks as though 2K Marin went back to the drawing board and came up with a project that’s truer to its predecessors. The developers said that their initial take XCOM was too much in their comfort zone. The team that developed Bioshock 2 said it was too much like that game. This time around, it’s still a first-person shooter, but now, there’s more of a focus on using strategy in actual combat.